Hello all,
Following some recent performance issues, we have been advised by our web development company to disable SOAP Compression on our gateway server as this would improve performance during busy periods.
I'm not familiar with API calls so wanted to see if anyone else had experienced this issue or had any advice.
Their actual response; (BO refers to BlocksOffice which is their intermediate software)
"Hi all,
Further to the issues with the onsale this morning, we have investigated the cause, which appears to have been changes to the BO cluster caching functionality which were made around two months ago. The caching change caused requests made to booking widgets to be served uncached, generating an overwhelming amount of API calls under on-sale conditions and subsequently bringing down the SOAP compression proxy server that the Theatre Royal BO implementation uses as an intermediary node between BO and the API.
This was fixed by enabling caching on the booking widgets, which stopped the SOAP compressions proxy server from being overwhelmed.
While we have resolved this issue, Theatre Royal is using a BlocksOffice setup which contributed to this issue occurring and going undiagnosed prior to the on-sale. Though the temporary caching change will ensure that this problem doesn't occur again, we would advise that aspects of the Theatre Royal BlocksOffice implementation should be altered to prevent the likelihood of issues unique to Theatre Royal appearing in the future. I have listed a couple of approaches to this below:
SOAP Proxy Requirements
Theatre Royal Plymouth are unique amongst our BlocksOffice clients as SOAP compression is enabled on Tessitura. To accommodate this we have to proxy traffic from Theatre Royal BO to the API via a custom built nginx/LUA server. This proxy service is a single point of failure and can throttle traffic at high levels of throughput. We believe that we should work towards removing the need for this proxy service by disabling SOAP compression on the TRP API server.
Is this a viable option for you, or is something you would want to continue with?"
Any advice or guidance would be appreciated.
Thanks
Jamie
Hello Jamie,
See APPENDIX F: SOAP COMPRESSION in the SOAP API Guide v12 document for details related to our SOAP compression and configuration.
-Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the reply. I had already read the SOAP v12 guide it was more that I was looking for guidance to the advice we were being provided by our web development company as we were being asked to turn it off, rather than on.
I've decided to try it anyway and see what happens.
Regards,